A Gearing Flowchart

As promised, here is my 4.0.3/4.0.6 Tank Gearing Flowchart!

Green = Start
White = Me
Red = Me, making a recommendation
Grey = You

Death Knight-specific information is from Pwnwear; Druid-specific information is from the official tanking forums and The Inconspicuous Bear; Paladin-specific information is from Maintankadin; and Warrior-specific information is from my own flowchart.

For the sake of the flow, I did oversimplify my warrior recommendation. If you have over 1000 mastery, warriors should slightly prefer parry over dodge, but the specific ratio of parry:dodge varies with mastery and honestly I should just give you my spreadsheet, shouldn’t I.

Maybe after the weekend’s Rift beta.

Also, click on the flowchart to see it full size. Please. It’s not my intention to destroy your eyes.

To Rift!

P.S. I’m trying out the Riftstalker, the rogue tanking soul. Should be interesting. I may report back on what I find!

Stamina and the Vengeance Cap

Tangedyn over at The Inconspicuous Bear – who is rapidly joining Zarko, Wrathblood and Theck in the ranks of Theorycrafters I Fangirl Over – has some interesting news about the Vengeance cap.

As originally advertised, Vengeance was supposed to cap at 10% of our max health; but no one was reporting reaching this cap, so it has been widely assumed that stacking stamina to increase the Vengeance cap would have no effect on threat, or in the case of bears, Savage Defense. If we weren’t reaching the Vengeance cap at our current levels of stamina, adding more would be a waste!

Well, it turns out that Vengeance is not linked to max health after all, because the underlying mechanics of Vengeance were not implemented as advertised. Instead of being based on health, Vengeance scales at a 1:1 ratio with stamina. (It also has a small contribution from base health, but base health cannot be modified, so there’s no scaling – just a tiny bit of naked vengeance). Word from the blues is that this is intended, and that Savage Defense is balanced around this lower Vengeance value.

Button’s Cataclysm Pre-Raid Best in Slot Lists

I’ve never really understood having a single “best in slot” list for tanking (or healing) gear. It makes sense for DPS, since in most cases what you need won’t change by the fight. Sure, you’ll have your occasional caster bosses or fights where you attack from the front, where melee could use more or less expertise; but generally these are fights where the raid is struggling with execution, not with DPS.

Tanks, on the other hand, have a lot to gear around. There are fights where sustained threat matters and fights where sustained threat is a joke; fights where armor and avoidance matter and fights with 100% magical damage (or nearly); fights where the most important thing is to take as few hits as possible, fights where the most important thing is to take as little damage as possible, and fights where the most important thing is to take as small of hits as possible; and of course, fights which call for X, Y or Z type of magic resistance, while gear of that resistance type is useless on most other encounters. To say that a certain gear set is best-in-slot can only really be done with reference to what it’s best at.

In Which Lost City Brutalizes my Sanity

For those of you just joining us, I’m going through the normal mode dungeons completely unprepared and without DBM, for the fun of learning the encounters through wiping. Please excuse any idiotic mistakes we made, because we literally don’t know any better.

Dear god they weren’t kidding when they said this was going to be harder.

OK, to be fair. We went in with 4/5 of the group undergeared according to the dungeon finder, and our one raiding DPS also underleveled. I was level 85 and nearing geared-enough-for-heroics, but Blanket (who was healing, as holy) had just dinged 84 and was drinking between most trash pulls as he became accustomed to his spells’ newly inflated costs.

We did OK until we got to High Prophet Barim, after easy kills of the first two bosses. Then we hit a wall of OOM.

First it was “OK I’m standing in Blanket’s good ground stuff WHY ISN”T IT HEALING ME OH GOD IT’S A WIPE.” Then we figured out that Blanket hadn’t been the one to put down the big bright circle, and so we should stay out of it. Next I tanked the big bird and tried to gather up the Soul Fragments too, but they kept disappearing and giving the bird health. OOM again, wipe. So then we tried DPSing the fragments down like on Bronjahm. Sorry, OOM, wipe. Try again. Again. We concluded that DPSing the fragments takes too long; kite them and burn the bird! We finally got to phase 3, but hey, OOM, wipe.

OOM, wipe.

OOM, wipe.

OOM wipe OOM wipe OOM wipe OOM wipe.

And me out of alcohol too. I could have used some.

A Little Link Love: Mo’ Content, Mo’ Problems

Recently, my WoW time has been occupied with… actually playing WoW! So instead of writing a marginally insightful post cribbed from assorted influences, I’ll throw you the influences and let you sort it out.

First up we have an old old old favorite of mine by Reversion of Looking For More: Profiling Tanking and Healing: the ‘Shape’ of the Fight. I’ve been meaning to bring this excellent post up for ages, but Reversion covers it so well that I honestly don’t know what to say on the subject. It deals with the effect that kill orders, CC and doing a pull right has on multitarget fights, which makes it particularly apropos now that we’re in the expansion’s 5-man phase. Go read it! It has pretty graphs.

Speaking of the 5-mans, Pwnwear has two very useful compilations: first, how to find them, and then how to beat them. I personally am keeping to my “Go into every (normal mode) instance fresh and have fun wiping while learning the mechanics” method of instancing, but I know not everyone is crazy. By the way, Death Knights, if you’re not following Pwnwear you definitely should be.

Now, on to the theorycrafting! Rhidach has laid out his preferred (paladin) tanking enchants for the expansion at Righteous Defense. Because paladins can reasonably block cap his priorities and preferences are a little different from mine and many of yours, but nonetheless it’s a solid starting point for any tank. On the warrior side, Lujanera is working out which meta gem we should use – +armor, or +block value? The math is ongoing on this one, so if you’re a mathy kind of person, come weigh in.

Finally, while you wait for me to finally get my act together and post up my pre-raid BiS list, check out Rhidach’s pre-Heroics gear list.

Archaeology is Frustrating

If there’s one thing that bugs me about leveling in WoW, it’s not having my professions trained to at or above a useful level. Maybe it’s because my main is a warrior, and I quickly learned that not having my First Aid trained up meant not getting heals in battlegrounds. Maybe it’s because that warrior is also an engineer, and the rate of obsolescence on vanilla engineering perks is so high that the coolest recipes stopped being useful as soon as you reached a level at which you could comfortably farm the mats. Whatever the reason, as soon as I heard of Archaeology I knew that my first few days in Cataclysm would be spent not questing, not instancing, but grinding Archaeology up to 450 so that I could level it naturally in the course of questing.

I hadn’t accounted for the fact that gathering now awards non-trivial amounts of XP.

At level 80, I was gaining just over 5000 XP per archaeology gather. This doesn’t sound like much until you consider how many gathers you have to make per skill-up. Each gather yields 2-3 fragments, plus a keystone if you’re lucky; and you need 35-100 fragments per artifact. (A keystone counts as 12 fragments, but you can only use them on certain artifacts, and on non-rare artifacts you can use a maximum of one per solve.) After archaeology level 75 or so, the actual gathers stop giving you skill-ups; you’re limited to skilling up from solves alone. Each solve gives 3-8 skillups, leaning heavily towards the lower side. It takes a rare artifact to give a significant number of skill-ups, and rare artifacts require more fragments anyway. This means that for every point of Archaeology skill at level 80, I was earning about 27,000 XP. And XP from gathering scales with level, so at level 81, I’m now making over 6000 XP per gather.

I’m now level 81 and 16%, up from level 80 and 4%, just from leveling Archaeology. And I’m not even to Outland yet. I’m beginning to fear that I’ll be stepping into the Cataclysm zones at level 84, wearing all Wrath gear. I’m seriously considering turning off XP at this point, because it’s looking like that’s the only way I’ll manage to have an organic leveling experience.

It’s important that you not take this the wrong way, because you will get very frustrated very quickly if you try leveling Archaeology as a way of powering to 85. Archaeology takes a long time to level. I played for 10 hours straight to get my archaeology to 213. You need to fly all around the appropriate continent(s), from digsite to digsite; and when you get to the digsite you need to triangulate the artifact’s location to within a yard via a game of Red Light, Green Light before you can pick it up.

Why this sucks

Did I mention that I’m moderately red-green color-blind?

More armor nerfs inc?

I’m willing to bet a fair sum of gold that Wrath’s armor trinkets get nerfed to the ground before the end of 2010.

Consider this comparison. The Bedrock Talisman, a valor point reward, pales in comparison to our old friend the Glyph of Indomitability. Sure, its on-use is significantly better than the glyph’s, but compared to the Organ? the Scale? No contest.

At this point I’m strongly considering running with the Glyph as one of my entry-level raiding trinkets – even farming Prof well past 80 to see if the Organ will finally drop for me. (I can tell you in advance that it won’t.) I can only conclude that the devs are waiting patiently for Cataclysm to hit store shelves so that they can re-implement the drastic armor nerfs of 4.0.1 without the tank QQ that accompanied it last time.

…but I’ll still have my heart!